Creating with clay

Happy Mother's Day!
I'm so excited to show you what we've been up to!  I could hardly wait until the children passed these beauties along to their mothers so that I could share it without ruining the surprise.



With inspiration from the garden (and from some vases I spotted at West Elm), we've been busy creating gifts to honor the mothers in our lives.  We even moved our make-shift ceramics studio outside to take advantage of some beautiful spring weather. 





The children began by rolling out slabs.  They used a ceramics needle tool to cut out a rectangle.














The needle tool was then used to score the edges of the rectangle where they would be joined together.  Scoring roughs the surface of the clay and allows the two textured edges to grab each other like Velcro.




The two edges were joined and blended to create a cylinder. 

Next, a base was traced in the clay and attached with more scoring.















The clay was smoothed,

and plants from our gardens were pressed into the clay.  Mostly, we used fennel flowers from our own prolific plant.

After drying and firing in the kiln (that we are so lucky to have on campus), it was time to glaze.  First, each child selected a color and used a paintbrush to wiggle glaze into all of the wonderful depressions and crevices created by the plant imprints. 
















Next, they sponged off the glaze from the background to reveal the plant imprint.

Finally the entire vase was coated in layers of clear gloss glaze, which looks pink before it is fired.














Glaze is not entirely intuitive for children (or adults!) because the color and texture changes with the heat of the kiln, but that's also part of the fun!  Opening a kiln with a glaze load is like Christmas morning.  I love having the honor of being the first to see how each child's much-loved project looks when completed.

Take a look!

Aren't they just lovely?!  West Elm has nothing on our little artists!

Yes, kids can!

This morning, fourteen students from our class, their families, and I got up early to make the journey to Quintana Beach County Park for the annual spring Texas Adopt-a-Beach Beach Cleanup.  All together, our class contributed a total of 43 volunteers to the effort today! 






Trash accumulates on our Texas coasts when it is left behind by careless beach-goers and when is washes ashore from streams, rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico.

The coastwide beach cleanups take place twice a year--one in the fall (usually the end of September) and once in the spring (typically the end of April).  Thousands of volunteers work to collect an average of 500 tons of trash from Texas beaches every year.  The Texas General Land Office provides gloves, trash bags, pencils, and trash data cards for gathering information about the trash that is found.  Most sites (ours included) also provide a complimentary lunch for volunteers.







The children worked together with parents to collect and tally marine debris that could be harmful to the habitat, including glass, plastic, many cigarette butts, and many meters of fishing line. 

We even found a plastic dinosaur!

Along the way, the children also had on their naturalist hats, spotting a surprising number of ladybugs, wonderful mollusks, a hermit crab, shore birds, a rock with coral attached, and a beautiful spotted egg. 












The families had a great time, and I think all of the children ended up wading in the water.  It was the perfect combination of field work, environmental service project, and family fun.  A definite win-win! 


Perhaps this will become a class tradition . . .

There's a Book for That!
Seashore (One Small Square) by Donald Silver
The New 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth
Where Does the Garbage Go? by Paul Showers
Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, & the Science of Ocean Motion by Loree Griffin Burns
Follow the Water from Brook to Ocean by Arthur Dorros
One Well: The Story of Water on Earth by Rochelle Strauss
Earth Day--Hooray! by Stuart Murphy
Oil Spill! by Melvin Berger
Life in the Ocean: The Story of Oceanographer Silvia Earle by Claire Nivola

Bringing Field Work into Focus

Maria Montessori writes, “Let us take the child out to show him real things instead of making objects which represent ideas and closing them in cupboards" (From Childhood to Adolescence).

Thus is the nature of field work.

Yesterday, was Field Day at our school, but due to rescheduling because of weather, our class was on a field trip instead.  "We're doing Field Work instead of Field Day.  I think ours is better," commented one child as our bus pulled away from the school.  I must say, I completely agree.





To go out of a classroom to enter the outside world

. . . is obviously to open an immense door to instruction.

--Maria Montessori, From Childhood to Adolescence

Field work allows us to "take the child out to show him real things."  We go out into the world beyond the classroom walls and live the experience of scientific process in an outdoor setting.









Five years ago, I had the pleasure and honor of participating in the Paleontology Field School for Educators, offered by the paleontologists from the Houston Museum of Natural Science.  This program is a unique opportunity to participate in the scientific process as museum paleontologists find, unearth, document, and remove fossils from the Red Beds of North Central Texas.  Rather than the clean, sterile impression imparted by a visit to a museum where we see only the end-result, field science is dirty.  It's experiential.  And it's a process.  Paleontologists are detectives, engaged in the puzzle-solving process of assembling clues, piecing together a picture of how portions of the earth's past might have looked.  As I continue to volunteer with the field team, our view of how this habitat might have looked 280 million years ago changes over time, as more evidence is gathered.


My own field science experiences have shifted my approach to field trips for children.  Instead of being passive observers on field trips, I am convinced that children need to become active participants in field work so that they begin to understand that science isn't a static set of facts.  It is a process by which we use evidence to build our understanding of the world around us (and demolish and reconstruct that understanding when the evidence requires).  The children need to dig their hands into the dirt and engage in inquiry, grappling with the questions, "What do we observe?  Are there any patterns?  What are some possible explanations for the evidence we're finding?  Are there any other possible explanations?"  It was this appreciation for field work that compelled me to write a Target Field Trip Grant so that I could take the children to the river's edge for fossil field work.


screening for tiny fossils such as shark teeth

To do this successfully, the children (rather than the environment) must be properly prepared with skills and tools (along with awareness of potential hazards).  For the past month or so, the children have been engaged in Timeline of Life research on the Eras, Periods, and Epochs of earth's history.  They have learned to classify organisms by five kingdoms (Monera/Bacteria, Protoctista, Fungi, Plantae, Animalia), sort and graph animals as vertebrate or invertebrate, and then classify organisms from the animal kingdom by phylum.  In class, we modeled the process of vertebrate paleontology as I experienced it in the Red Beds.  The children worked with fossil matrix from the site where we would be digging to practice finding, sorting, and identifying fossils (mostly marine invertebrate) so that they would be primed to recognize the fossils found at this particular locality; classifying the mollusk fossils by class (bivalve, gastropod, scaphopod, or cephalopod); proper use of tools (including a sharp probe); and gathering and organizing data in the form of charts and graphs.  We gathered and organized tools (sharp probes, forceps, trowels, screwdrivers, brushes, straws, screens, magnifiers, measuring tapes & centimeter rulers, collection bags, field notebooks, field guides, and a field microscope) and discussed potential hazards (sharp tools, snakes, poison ivy, scorpions, a train trestle, a highway, and a major river) and how to keep ourselves safe.



consulting with David Temple, Associate Curator of
Paleontology, to identify a fossil

Our fossil field work cultivated curiosity and fostered some serious excitement about science.  It promoted an understanding of the process of field science, and it also allowed students to practice science process skills (observation, classification, identification, measurement, collection and analysis of data, inference, communication) and use the tools of science in an authentic context.  It allowed them to consult with geology and paleontology experts (and view scientists as accessible resources), but it also allowed them to see themselves as scientists.



brushing dirt away to reveal fossils

teasing tiny fossils from the matrix





using a screwdriver to pry matrix away from the bank of the river
 

using a field guide to identify fossils

taking notes in personal field notebook



collaborating to classify fossil finds



organizing data in a chart






How many fossilized burrows (trace fossils)
fit in your backpack?



recording data in the group's field notebook

There's a Book for That!

If You Are a Hunter of Fossils by Byrd Baylor

From Lava to Life by Jennifer Morgan

In My Own Backyard by Julie Kurjian

Fossils Tell of Long Ago by Aliki

Mary Anning: Fossil Hunter by Sally M. Walker

Finding the First T. Rex by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld

There's a song for that, too!
National Fossil Day Song by NPS/Jeff Wolin
Fossil Rocks by Tom McFadden
I am a Palentologist by They Might Be Giants
 

Thank you to Target Field Trip Grants, Becks Prime, and the Sarmiento Family for generously sponsoring our expensive bus (with a bathroom in the back).  Thank you to the Houston Museum of Natural Science and Associate Curator of Paleontology David Temple for generously providing seven volunteers and staff who served as experts for the children's field work.  Thank you to the nine chaperones who joined us to ensure our children were safe and focused on investigating.



Peer into the Past



examining a tiny gastropod

We have been gearing up for our upcoming field trip.  We will travel near Bryan, Texas to a fossil locality known as Stone City, where the children will do fossil field work, digging into the past to collect, identify, and tally marine (mostly invertebrate) fossils from the Eocene Epoch (about 45 million years ago) when most of Texas was covered by sea.

To prepare my young paleontologists for this task, it was important to practice safe and appropriate use of tools, as well as training their brains to recognize the shapes, patterns, and colors of some likely finds at the site. 

To do this, each group received a tray of matrix collected at Stone City.  They also received a set of fossil guides and the paleontology tools we will be using: brushes, forceps, a metric ruler, a sharp probe (a ceramics needle), a Sharpie, and magnifiers.

another tiny gastropod

The children combed through the matrix, using the forceps to carefully tease out tiny fossils.



tiny gastropods

Because this was a marine habitat during the Eocene Epoch, we find a lot of mollusks--mostly gastropods but also scaphopods, bivalves, and the rare cephalopod (squid "beak").  Check out how tiny these finds are! 



bryozoa, coral

We also find coral, bryozoa, otoliths (~fish inner ear), ray teeth, and shark teeth.

otoliths



using a hand lens

The children examined each fossil closely. 

It's a real advantage to have
 a microscope in the classroom.

They practiced using the fossil guides to identify their finds.

To record and communicate their findings, each child selected some fossils for which to create fossil identification pages. 

The child recorded the date, fossil locality, era, period, epoch, fossil name, and classification (phylum and class) and included a detailed illustration.

The illustration was labeled with the fossil's measurement.

 

Resources for Stone City (near Bryan, Texas)

produced by the Houston Gem and Mineral Society

Map

Q&A about the site

Stone City fossil ID cards

Fossil guide

Check Brazos River depth (~7' on the day we went)